


It Follows the Beam

by Zara Hemla (zarahemla)



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Book: The Gunslinger, Book: The Waste Lands, Book: Wizard and Glass, Future Fic, Gen, Jericho Hill, all things serve the fuckin beam, demons are bad, jake is dead no he's not, jake keeps falling, the circle demon, the touch, witches remember
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 00:05:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7382977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarahemla/pseuds/Zara%20Hemla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten short Dark Tower stories written for prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Follows the Beam

**1\. Hile Gilead**

Jamie skids around the corner of the boys' quarters, screaming at the top of his lungs. "It's beginning! It's beginning! With Roland!" At that name, Cuthbert, who had been idly playing cards, drops a perfect (Alain notices) hand of Watch Me onto the table and bolts out of the room. And after those performances, Alain has to follow, jogging heavily after his friends into the green corridor of the proving ground.

"What? What?" he asks Jamie, who is panting on one of the stone spectator's benches. And then he sees Roland standing alone at the west end, with something black and moving on his arm, and the Touch explodes behind his eyes, painting Roland in a halo of weltering red. Alain's vision -- solidifies -- there is no other word for it -- and he sees that it is David on Roland's arm, irritably fussing in his jesses.

"Look," says Cuthbert in a strangled voice, and to the east a shadow falls and that shadow becomes Cort and his walking stick, both blazing in blue like the perfect heart of a fire. Alain puts his hand on Cuthbert's arm; his friend's whole body is as tight as a bowstring and his mind is almost perfectly blank. Alain has never felt such a blank mind before, and it frightens him.

The two combatants on the field begin their ritual words. Alain can't quite follow -- it all seems odd and disjointed, and all he can think of is how not half an hour ago he was eating a leftover bun from the food in the Great Hall. A vision comes very clearly then: Roland's mother, her head canted downward and a sad smile on her face, and a man's hand in a dark sleeve set at the base of her neck. Alain can't focus the Touch any further and can't follow that sleeve up to its owner's face, but he knows now. Something --

"Something to do with his mother," he says half-aloud, but Roland has finished the ritual and launched the hawk -- launched it at Cort -- and Cuthbert surges under Alain's arm, rising to his feet shouting, "Hile! Gunslinger! Hile Gilead!" and no one, not even a boy with second sight, knows where this will lead.

(Prompt: "beginnings")

**10\. Careless Love**

Here's a story no one remembers and no one would believe, aye, not even that pert Delgado bitch with her simpering smile and her "yes Rhea"s dripping from her stupid mouth. Here's a story no one remembers.

Many years ago there was a girl who was not pretty. She lived in a village in the Outer Baronies with her mother and father and five other sisters. She was the eldest, aye, and smart as the whip that stings your back, but she couldn't escape her ka. One day a woman came a-tapping at the door and called her mother into their small front room. Her mother came out wailing and said, "Rhea, you must go with her."

And so Rhea went, will she or nill she, and a sack of coin was what her faithless mother got in exchange -- if it even was money the next day and not a bag of straw. Witches' coin, Rhea came to learn, was not trustworthy. Witches took what they wanted, and be damned to anyone in their way. The woman taught Rhea, and Rhea learned. 

Herbs, poisons, familiars, books of learning and books of spells. She learned fast and she never forgot. About the wizards and their glasses, about guns and gunslingers, about what men and women like in bed and how to take everything afterward. But there were things she forgot -- no. Disremembered. Things that made a witch weak. Love. Faith. Honesty. Charity. She spit them out of herself. She ate hemlock and drank ichor instead. 

Careless love indeed. Could anything be more careless than love? What does love care, aye, for anything? Love and Rhea have much in common, for they burn you up to a shell and steal the best parts of you. As Miss Delgado will find out, will _she_ or nill she. Rhea is looking forward to it.

(prompt: "years")

**14\. Life By the Drop**

In the autumn, the grass on the Drop turns brown, but in the early spring it is as green as a girl could want, dotted with daisies and looking like the most beautiful carpet in the world. Susan comes home, like as not, festooned in chains of flowers, and Aunt Cord gives her the usual sniff, the one that says, girl, when will you wake up and grow up? But Susan doesn't want to grow up; she's happy, at least mostly happy, riding across the Drop in her father's old shirt.

This is the spring, however, when she sees people watching her in town. She does not exactly know why women whisper when she comes out of the general store, their faces turned urgently towards one another. Why, coming out of church in a dress she likes especially, all the men are suddenly busy with a stirrup or mud on their boots. Only last year she had been able to say hello to anyone she pleased -- now, Aunt Cord hauls her along like a toy on a string, hissing "Come along girl, don't jabber all day!"

When she is hanging up clothes on the line, sometimes boys will come along the street and stop and talk to her. She likes the attention -- she likes to talk. Why is it that Aunt Cord hustles her quickly into the kitchen, saying something about the floor needing washing? A spark is beginning to fire in Susan's brain, but the blaze hasn't caught yet. In a week or so she will understand fully, when Mayor Thorin corners her in the loft of the church and says some very improper things. In a month or so, she will become his promised wife. In two, she will meet a boy who changes everything, and in four -- in four, she will be dead. 

But right now, Susan smiles at Aunt Cord as she peels a carrot for dinner. Aunt Cord smiles back, for they haven't begun to poison one another with witch's hatred yet. Right now, the wind through the grass in the Drop is still soft.

(prompt: "green")

**27\. Evisceration**

Elmer Chambers screams into the phone again about cutting off someone's balls. Jake can't remember a time when he didn't know in excruciating detail about how to eviscerate someone, or hack off their nose, or pop out their eyeballs. It's just the way his dad talks. 

He wonders how it would be to go to the park with his father. Probably something along the lines of, "Catch that ball, son, or I'll rip off your arm and beat you with it." Idyllic.

He passes through the living room where his mother is busy at her typewriter. She inputs something, looks at it, shakes her head, and begins again. 

"What are you working on, mom?" asks Jake.

"Oh!" She looks up and focusses on him for a minute, then smiles and looks back down at the keys. "Nothing really."

She always says that.

In his head, the clamor begins again. _You're dead. You're not dead. Listen to me! The boy is dead! No he isn't, you idiot, he's standing right here!_

_Jake. Jake. You're dead._

(prompt: "parents")

**31\. New Orleans**

As they begin to see the city of Lud on the horizon, looming upwards as if to block all light, Eddie starts to hum a song he remembers his father singing. Eddie remembers very little of his father; almost nothing, you might say. But there is this song. As he hums, Susannah joins in, and her voice is better than his. Eddie stops.

"You know it too?"

"Sugar, you think you have a lock on the blues?"

"That's not a blues song!" says Eddie indignantly. "It's good old rock-n-roll."

"Then how come I heard Nina Simone sing it in a coffee house?" She breaks out again, belting like a torch singer as Eddie bounces her along in her chair. "There is a house in New Orleans / they call the Rising Sun ..."

"I know that song," says the gunslinger suddenly, and both Eddie and Susanna swivel around to stare at him. He starts up too, and his voice is even better than Susannah's. "And it's been the ruin of many a poor young girl, and gods, I know I'm one." To the astonished look on the other two's faces, he says, "Only we called it Gillytown and not that other place you said."

"New Orleans," says Eddie faintly. "Will wonders never cease."

"No," says the gunslinger. "I imagine they never will."

(prompt: "sunrise")

**43\. The corpse**

Three days before the strangers walk into Lud, Maud has this dream:

The town square. The dark faces of the hanged people. The battered face of Spanker, tipped obscenely sideways. His jaw, jigging up and down as it attempts speech. The voice of him, talking the language of doom.

"Maud," he says, "Maud." And in her dream she cannot speak, only stare, as he says "Maud," one more time and giggles, pieces of black flesh falling from his bones and dropping aimlessly onto the cobbles of Lud.

"I am the black man, the wizard. I come to you from far away and I bear a message."

Her vocal cords stop seizing and she is able to say, "Aye," very faintly. She can hear her own heart thumping like the god-drums; wham, wham, wham.

"They shall walk into town," hisses Spanker, "a man and another man; a dark woman and a boy. Which ones you shall meet, I do not know. But Maud, hear me well -- they will want to see the train."

"The train," she says softly.

"Yes Maud, the train. And no matter their words or their god-rotted guns, Maud, pointed at you, you shall not lead them to it. Do you understand?"

"No." She feels joy at saying it, for Spanker would never speak to her like this. A gentle soul, he was, and with only a little hurt in him. When they took him and did for him, she had cried a little, in the hole of her own place. "You aren't Spanker, so you aren't, and I don't have to listen to you."

"No, Maud, I am not Spanker," says that corpse, and then he reaches out with one dead hand and begins to choke her. As she gags for breath, clawing at his cold fingers, he continues: "But just the same, you must, Maud, you must listen to me."

She wakes in the cold light of dawn, feeling frantically at the marks ringing her neck. But they have faded almost entirely three days later, when she meets the gunslingers.

(prompt: "square")

**44\. The Demon**

He still remembers the day he was trapped. His name, he has long forgotten; his occupation or his family members or the color of his hair. But he remembers the woman that did it, that put him in the circle and trapped him for eternity. She did it with salt and a speaking charm, but she had power behind her. He remembers her chanting strange words, thickening the air around both of them.

He remembers pleading with her and the look she gave him. Oh, he remembers the humiliation of it. She thought she had all the power. But someday she will forget, someday she will come into the circle again. And he has spent countless years planning his revenge. Oh, how hungry he is. Hungry for everything.

He will eat her alive. He will gulp down her blood, he will chew on her bones. He will fuck her blind. He will scream in her ear, howling those words, spitting them back at her. She will pay, that woman, that woman unwise enough to wander across his boundaries. She will pay, she will pay with every molecule of her being. He has sworn it, and so it will be.

(prompt: "circle")

**64\. The Bridge, And the River Under It**

The splintered, final creaking of the wood, and then the fall through the long black dark. The bridge, receding, as Jake screams silently. Laughter -- whose? the man in black's? and is there such a man? -- booming out echoes. 

"Go then," says the gunslinger in his ear. "Go then, there are --"

And Jake wakes up.

* * *

One, two, three, four trestle ties missing. Something slippery as he puts his hand down. Laughter -- no, a river, isn't that the sound of water? -- booming out echoes. Slip. Crack. Break.

"Go then," says the gunslinger in his ear. "There are other worlds than these."

And Jake wakes up.

* * *

A push on the small of his back; the pinwheel his arms make as he barrels forward. The wild pain of something in his chest cracking. Gasp. Try to breathe. Laughter -- why would the gunslinger bring him all the way here to kill him? -- booming out echoes.

"There other -- " says the gunslinger. "There are other --"

And Jake wakes up.

* * *

Air with weight, that tries to invade instead of just letting Jake breathe it. The terrified certainty that something is coming up behind. Laughter -- his own? Is he truly mad then? -- booming out echoes.

"Other worlds," says the gunslinger. "Go then, there -- "

And Jake

 

(prompt: "fall")

**86\. Cradle to a casket.**

A Beam stretches across the sky above Jericho Hill and Alain can't keep his eyes off it. Farson's machines spit fire and they are fearsome, fearsome, but their smoke follows the Beam. Cuthbert's hair whips in the wind away from his face, and it follows the Beam. A soldier dies, gaping and bleeding, his hand pointing toward the Dark Tower.

Brief respite for their company: the sunset will stop the machines, because Farson won't waste oil on illumining his enemies. But after sunset, the commanders will call Alain and ask him to use his Touch to find things -- random things, it seems to him. Last night they kept him up all night finding out who was running Farson's water. He hadn't really been able to tell except that it was carried in tankers. And it didn't seem to matter, because no one did anything about it. Was it a desperate ploy or just busywork? Alain can't imagine why anyone would put him to useless tasks, with Farson on the other end of the valley and coming on fast.

And the Touch has been vague lately; as if it knows how he almost betrayed his friends with the Pink Glass. Alain and the Touch are only acquaintances as it is: one has the whip hand, and one dances to the blows. Trying to force it leaves him bruised somewhere inside; all the gentle, insistent urgings of his commanders cannot change what he isn't being told.

Under a canvas lean-to, twenty feet away, Cuthbert sits and watches the valley, hugging his knees. Roland is on an errand, taking messages around on Rusher. Not everyone has a horse, and certainly not one like Rusher. The two of them together seem to dodge bullets. And even bullets follow the Beam, gigging backwards sometimes or sideways, along that (in)visible track that carries all hope upon it. Hope is on the wind, as Alain's father used to say: and Alain would add, watching blood mat into the grass of Jericho Hill, that the wind is on the Beam.

Stumbling a little on the uphill path, he slides up to and then under the lean-to with Cuthbert. The dark is bringing cold with it: not that a bit of canvas will keep the cold away, but Alain can kind of huddle up against it and pretend.

Cuthbert stares off into the distance, seemingly watching the last of Farson's shells and cannonballs pound the Hill's breastworks. "Naphtha," he says, and the word is completely unfamiliar to Alain. 

"What?"

"Naphtha," says Cuthbert again, and spells it. "Captain says that's what they call the flaming stuff. I saw it cover a man on a horse. They couldn't -- get the flames out -- they just had to let him run in circles, burning."

"Naphtha," repeats Alain, committing it to memory. He has not been sent to the front yet, even to defend the rudimentary walls ringing the Hill. Roland has not either -- he is kept too busy playing messenger. But Cuthbert has spent four days watching Farson's mechanical mouths splatter obscenities.

"Thank the Turtle and all the gods we blew that oil to the sky," says Cuthbert. "Everything was worth it because we did that." Alain says nothing, remembering the sight (the pink sight) of a girl who hadn't gotten the flames out either, who had been let to burn.

Cuthbert buries his face in his bent knees. "Fuckers," he says dimly. "Those fuckers are going to burn this poor world, and we are going to go with it. We're desperate -- and we're losing."

"We aren't," says Alain automatically, even though he is not even sure whether he's telling the truth. 

When his friend replies, his voice is so thickly bitter that Alain actually scoots back a bit. "You're always looking for morning-glories, 'Lain. Eyes open for flowers and missing the biter-snake. We've been Farson's gilly-girls for a long time, dancing to his tune, and now he's taken us out of the throne room and got us alone and now he's going to fuck us."

Alain has nothing to say to that and he sits in shocked silence, listening to Cuthbert talking as if his heart is an open wound.

"All our glamours avail us nothing against machines -- we have stopped being able to magick them. He has some kind of counter-spell working, he has the Wizard's Glass and he's come out of the storybook. This world is moving on -- can you feel it, 'Lain?" For the second time he uses the short-name that he called Alain by when they were ten and living lorne and lone in a boys' dorm, daily savaged by Cort and the older boys.

"I feel it." Alain shivers, caught up in the wind, watching the world end along the Beam.

 

(prompt: "life")


End file.
